


chiasmus

by amilynholdo



Category: Rita (TV)
Genre: F/F, also this is set in s5 so helle is pregnant in this so like. yeh, yes this is just me liking simbolism a bit too much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:02:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26033128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amilynholdo/pseuds/amilynholdo
Summary: Latin term from Greek χίασμα, "crossing", from the Greek χιάζω, chiázō, "to shape like the letter Χ"(Rita and Helle's garden chat in 5x01 goes a different way)
Relationships: Rita Madsen/Helle Uggerby
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	chiasmus

**Author's Note:**

> This is set during/after the scene in 5x01 when Helle goes to leave Rasmus's stuff at Rita's and they have a chat. So, yeah, essentially it disregards most of s5 after that point I guess?

‘Stop saying that.’

‘Saying what?’

‘That I’m a lesbian,’ explains Helle, as if it needs explaining.

‘And why should I stop?’ Rita asks, from her seat in her garden, where Helle just dumped all of Rasmus’ stuff.

Helle has no real reply, apart from: ‘Because I’m asking you to.’

‘Right.’ Rita leans back on the picnic table, and crosses an ankle over her opposite knee. ‘And why do you think I keep saying it?’

‘Because your instinct for getting on my nerves tells you this is the most efficient way.’

‘Because it’s true.’

‘It’s not true.’

Rita purses her lips. ‘Then why do you keep checking me out?’

‘I do not!’ Helle knows her vehemence could be mistaken for overcompensation, but this is too frustrating.

‘Yes, you do. You did even when you were hellbent on pretending you didn’t like me.’

Helle takes a deep breath in, closing her eyes. When she opens them, she puts on her best headmistress voice and tries to have a serious conversation. ‘I am not a lesbian. I am just a woman in her forties who’s been married her entire adult life, and dove into a relationship straight after her marriage ended. I just want to take some time to reflect. Time for self-discovery. To find my own identity, just like you did.’

Rita snickers at the thought. ‘Has it occurred to you that the “identity” I found since we last saw each other is “Big Ol’ Muffdiver”?’

Helle is left speechless.

_‘Just like you did’_ , Rita says, in a poor imitation of Helle’s voice, then she bursts into laughter. ‘I bet you don’t think that comparison helps your point anymore, do you?’

Helle doesn’t think it’s funny. At all.

It just. Doesn’t make sense. She grabs onto the first half-coherent thought that crosses her mind, and runs with it.

‘But… Rasmus?’

Rita shrugs. ‘Could never really love him. I thought the problem was him. But then I realised there is actually not one thing wrong with Rasmus. If I can’t love him, if I can’t love any of the men I insisted on being around, if I can’t at the very least enjoy being around them, then maybe there is something wrong with me. Sounds familiar?’

Helle is scandalised. ‘No! See, that’s what bothers me about this. There’s nothing _wrong_ with being a lesbian. And you shouldn’t keep using that word as a way to get to people. I am not a member of the LGBT community but I am a… supporter. And I know what you are and you aren’t supposed to say. And this? This you definitely are not supposed to say.’

Rita arches an eyebrow, in that insufferable way she does when she thinks she knows everything about something. ‘Oh, so that’s the reason you get angry, now. You’re an ally. Well, you must be the biggest ally in the world, to spend all this energy denying it.’

‘It’s just- It’s just wrong to claim an identity that is not mine!’ Helle gets so flustered talking about this. ‘I did an online seminar on sexual orientation and gender identity, so I learnt everything there is to know about this kind of stuff.’

Rita shakes her head. ‘And did the online seminar say anything about being attracted to your former colleague who is also your ex’s ex, and who _just happens_ to be a woman?’

Helle frowns.

‘No?’ Rita replies to herself, defiant as ever. ‘I didn’t think so.’

Helle gets up to leave.

‘I am not a lesbian,’ she says one last time.

‘Alright, alright. You’re not a lesbian.’ Rita raises her hands in defeat, but there is a sparkle in her eye that tells Helle she’s not defeated at all. ‘In that case, you won’t be opposed to a bet.’

‘A bet?’

‘I’m going upstairs now,’ explains Rita, like the plan was always clear in her mind. ‘It might come as a surprise to you, but I have a school to run, and I can’t spend my whole weekend arguing about your lesbianism.’

Helle opens her mouth to reply, but Rita interrupts her. ‘Or lack thereof.

So. Here is what we are going to do. I am going to take my proud lesbian ass upstairs. And oh, it’s going to be so sad to see me go, but so hot, watching me leave...’ She adds this with the boldness of someone who is about to win a game of chess and knows it. Or just of someone who is Rita, messing with someone who is Helle. And it might be working. ‘And while I’m upstairs in my room all alone working on my laptop, you’re going to think long and hard about this. Well, not that long actually. You’re going to think about this very hard for 30 minutes. If at-’ Rita stops to check the time on her phone. ‘If at 8.37, precisely half an hour from now, I haven’t heard of you, I’m going to stop this. I’m going to stop flirting with you, I’m going to stop calling it like it is when I see you looking at me like that, and I’m going to stop calling you a lesbian. I’m not going to stop _thinking_ you’re a lesbian, but…’ She shrugs in ironic non-commitment, ‘the heart can’t be tamed, you know.’

She pauses for a second, and looks at Helle with a seriousness that looks entirely out of place on Rita’s face. Helle doesn’t like it, she wishes she could have that know-it-all rebellious smile back. It’s much harder to stay mad at this earnest one.

‘If, on the other hand, after you’ve thought about it, you find that you wouldn’t like me to stop after all. Well you know where to find me.’

With that, she leaves. Not without stopping before rounding the corner to look back at Helle with a wink, though.

Helle falls back down on the chair that she was occupying moments ago. She lets out a sigh of relief. Why is it that every single interaction with Rita leaves her feeling like this? What even is ‘like this’? Exhausted, for sure. Helle’s never run a marathon but this is what she imagines it feels like afterwards. Exhilarated, too. If this is what it’s like, then maybe this is the part of running a marathon that leads people to put themselves through it. Excited, definitely. And a bunch of other words starting with ‘ex’. Helle digs into her memory for what remains of her Latin course she took when she read somewhere that learning a dead language encouraged empathy. ‘Ex’ means all things ‘outside of’. Crossing a line. _Ex_ cess. Like the all the things you’re not supposed to do. Like thinking about your ex’s ex like that.

Definitely not supposed to do that. Not when your technically only here to drop some boxes and shed some of your past in the process. Not when you’re pregnant at this age and newly single and trying to figure things out. Not when the reason things are like this in the first place is that you left what appears to be the only good man on earth because you were what? Bored? Bored of being in a loving relationship and finally achieving all your shared goals?

So what if Helle doesn’t want to think about what this means? She’s fine with not crossing lines, thank you very much. She grabs her phone and opens her mindfulness app. She scrolls down the list of exercises. She’s done most of them multiple times in the past few months. ‘Meditation for calm – 10 minutes’. That should do.

She puts her earphones on, closes her eyes and relaxes her back against the wall, hoping no one will walk into Rita’s garden. The meditation works, for the first few minutes. Helle lets go of tension on her shoulders, on her neck, on her jaw. She concentrates on her breathing. She listens to the soothing recorded voice. ‘Take a deep breath in. And a long breath out. Deep breath in, long breath out. Deep breath in, long breath out, deep breath in, long breath out. Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out. In. Out. Inhale, exhale. Inhale. Exhale. In. Ex. In. Ex…’ Ex. Ex. Ex. X. Cross. Ex. Nope. Back to the recording. Concentrate. ‘In. Ex. In. Ex. In. Ex. In. Ex. Keep your own rhythm. Remember to make your inhalation deep and your exhalation long. Feel it expand your chest, then relax. Now move the breath down. Use your diaphragm. In. Out. Let it take up space. Feel your belly expand with it–’ That’s it. Helle rips her earphones out. The last thing she needs is to be reminded of her expanding belly.

She checks how long she’s stuck with the meditation. 7 minutes. Not bad, for someone going through a full-on identity crisis. Then she checks the time. 8:29.

And that’s when it hits her. She should not be here. If nothing Rita said was true, Helle would have simply left the moment Rita left her line of sight, no matter how intriguing the smirk on her face. She would have nothing of it, too. She would have been able to just hop on her car and never look back.

But she didn’t, did she? She sat on a garden chair trying not to think about it for… 25 minutes? It’s 8:32. And what conclusion has she come to? None, apart from not wanting to leave. And isn’t that conclusive enough? That she stayed and she hated it, and she despised it and she didn’t leave?

8:33 and Rita is standing on the door of Rita’s house, of the school Rita built with such passion and dedication.

8:34 and she crosses the threshold, wishing she had more time to snoop around without Rita knowing she did. Just to see what Rita’s new life looks like.

8:35 and she’s climbed up the stairs, and it’s just occurred to her that she has no idea which one of the doors on this corridor leads to Rita’s room.

8:36 and she’s just about gathered the courage to just open one of the doors, praying to whoever is up there that Rasmus is not behind it.

She opens it, and it’s Rita behind it. She’s curled up at the top of her bed, chin on her knee, ankles crossed, eyes on her laptop, looking so out of place in her baseball t-shirt against the flowery wallpaper. She often does look out of place. Extraordinary. But then, she sees Helle, and her smile goes wider than smugness can justify.

‘I knew it!’

Helle says nothing as she closes the door behind her. She leans her back against the white-painted wood, against Rita’s plaid shirts, haphazardly resting on top of one another on a couple of small hangers on the door. They smell like Rita. Not that Helle has that scent memorised. Actually, fuck it, she does. She definitely does. She’s tired of pretending she doesn’t so she takes in a deep breath, then lets it out.

‘Just in time, I see,’ comments Rita, while turning off the alarm she had apparently set for 8:37. Then she walks up to Helle, and she stops right in front of her, centimetres apart. ‘Does this mean…?’ Rita asks, with a vein of nervousness in her voice which is so uncharacteristic.

Helle nods. ‘It means you don’t have to stop calling me…’

‘A lesbian?’ Rita finishes for her.

‘A lesbian.’ Helle says it in a whisper, and it still feels too loud.

Rita does a gesture with her arm like she’s a kid who just scored at football, and not a grown woman who just caused another grown woman to change her entire worldview. It makes Helle smile.

‘So I win the bet!’

‘You win the bet,’ Helle concedes-

Rita plants her eyes firmly on Helle’s. ‘And what do I win?’ she asks, half playful half serious.

Helle surprises herself then, and crosses a line. (X).

She closes the distance between them. One step. Another step. She kisses Rita.

And as she does this, she is sure of what it means.

Helle knows what it means, now. When Rita kisses her neck _(x. x. x.)_ , she knows what it means. She’s happy to know it. Then, she loses track of every meaning for a moment, when she gets her hand under Rita’s shirt, so soft from being washed a thousand times, and feels the skin on her back, soft from the years and the lotions, the care and the hurt. She sees meaning again, when her own coat comes off, then her dress. After that, she gives up on trying, lets it mean whatever it wants to mean. Lets herself drift in and out of it. Of control, of knowledge. In, out.

Inhale, Rita’s hand on her hip, exhale, Rita’s lips on her skin, then moving downward. Inhale. No, it doesn’t have to mean anything. It certainly doesn’t have to mean anything when Rita’s telling her how good she is and it sends a shiver down her spine. Helle is fine with it only meaning something in this very moment, no strings attached. She certainly is fine with it while Rita’s face is between her legs, and… And it’s never felt this good before. Exhale. Yes, she’s fine with it meaning nothing.

Except.

When she’s done, Rita rests her head right above Helle’s right hip for a while, her thumb brushing in small circles around her belly button. Helle keeps her hand in Rita’s hair, massaging her scalp in total idleness. Rita wiggles upward a little awkwardly, until her face is aligned with what little bump is showing already on Helle’s stomach. Helle begins to gets self-conscious, and reaches for a blanket. But then. Rita places a kiss on her belly, delicately yet deliberately, like she’s signing a letter.

X.

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed this! i don't imagine many people will read it, but comments are always welcome!


End file.
